The Night of the Comet (27 page)

She laughed, as if I were making a joke, and then she became quick and serious. “You go down first so no one sees us together. I’ll wait here and then come down in a minute—”

I pulled her back to me, but in doing so I yanked her off balance and she fell over the ottoman. I tumbled on top of her, and we laughed, rolling together on the carpet. We stopped, and I was just leaning in to kiss her again when we heard someone in the hallway.

“Gabby! You up here?”

We jerked apart. Footsteps clomped toward her door. Gabriella scrambled up from the floor and looked wildly around the room.

“Gabby?” Mark called again. He rapped twice on her door.

“I’ll—” I whispered.

“Go!” she whispered, and then shouted at Mark through the door, “What? Yes! In a minute!”

I tried to open the balcony door but it was stuck. “How do you—?” I whispered, shaking the handle.

“Go! Go!” she whispered. “Coming!” she shouted.

I was diving behind the bed when her door opened and Mark walked in. “Hey, Gabby, what’re you—” Mark stopped short, seeing me. “Hello?”

“Hey,” I said, straightening up.

“What are you doing here?” He turned to Gabriella. “What’s he doing here?”

“He was just … nothing. We were talking, that’s all.”

“What’re you doing over there behind the bed?”

“Nothing. I’m just— I was going over there.” I pointed at the side window and went to it.

Gabriella began bustling around. She grabbed her shoes, slipped them on, and then checked her hair in the mirror, talking all the while.

“I was showing him my room. That’s all. He wanted to see it. He’s never seen it. Did you know Junior lives right across the water? Right over there. Where’ve you been? What’s everybody doing?”

“Everybody’s looking for you. Why was the door closed?”

“I can’t close my door? My god, don’t be so suspicious.” She brushed her hair a few strokes.

Mark went to the champagne bottle sitting on the table next to the armchair. He tilted it back with his fingertips and looked at me.

“I brought that,” I said.

“You brought this?”

“He was being all sneaky,” Gabriella said. “He stole it from the kitchen. He wanted to get me drunk.”

“You want some?” I asked Mark.

He glared, and for a second I thought he might snatch the bottle up and hurl it at me. But Gabriella dropped her brush on her dresser, went to the door, and slapped her thigh, like you would to call a dog to go for a walk.

“What’re we waiting for? Let’s go. Let’s go, boys!”

I slunk behind them out of her room. In the hallway, Gabriella gave me a quick apologetic look over her shoulder. But then, just to make it clear who belonged to whom, Mark draped his arm around her, pulled her close, and planted a kiss on her temple.

The bastard. I wanted to jump on his back and wrestle him to the floor; I wanted to beat his head against the wall. I squeezed my hands into fists and pressed them against my thighs, feeling miserable and angry and elated all at once. Gabriella took her hair in her fingers and began worrying it with both hands as we started down the stairs back to the party. We passed her portrait on the wall, Gabriella in a white dress holding a bouquet of yellow flowers and gazing off into the sunlight—

No wonder people wrote songs about this, I thought. No wonder
people fought and killed and died over this. I could still feel her kiss tingling on my lips. I was like a man on fire. I was shot through with bullet holes. I was in love; I was in love, and I was dying.

Rooms, rooms, and more rooms. The night wasn’t over yet.

As I was passing a little later through the front hallway to get my coat and leave, I bumped into Frank Martello coming out of the library.

“Ho ho ho!” he said, and laughed oddly. He clapped a hand on my shoulder and asked how I was enjoying the party. His face was red, his manner blustery. He asked if I’d seen my father. I said I thought he was out back.

“Out there?” he said, pointing.

“Yes, sir. I think so.”

“All righty, then. We’ll see you later.”

He clapped me on the back again and headed to the rear of the house, stuffing his hands in his pockets as he hurried away.

I paused beneath the chandelier. The hall was quiet. The tall double doors of the library stood half open. Something was up. Some strangeness in the air, a whiff of deceitfulness trailing in the wake of Frank Martello, drew me toward the library. I peeked in through the doors.

The room was empty—just the racks of coats, the leather armchairs, the desk, the globe of the world …

And my mother, standing at the floor-to-ceiling bookcase with her back to the room.

“Hello?”

She turned around. “Oh. Hi. I was just looking at the books. They sure have a lot, don’t they?”

She gave a quick, stiff smile. Her eyes glanced off mine as she moved away from the bookcase, touching her hair and walking shakily. Her shoes clicked across the polished wood floor and then were muffled by the corner of the oriental rug.

She wasn’t looking at any books. The realization came to me slowly and then all in a rush. An hour ago I might not have even noticed it, but now her condition seemed as obvious to me as her red hair and green dress, as obvious as her yellow cape dropped on the floor over there at the base of the bookcase.

My mother was a woman on fire. She was shot through with bullet holes. She was miserable and angry and elated, all at once. Her lips—I could practically see it as she drew nearer—her lips were still tingling from where he’d kissed her.

OOH
love … Ooh love …

In the morning the sky was low and yellow. A white fog rose up from the bayou and crept across the yard, transforming the scene outside my bedroom window into someplace strange and only vaguely familiar. Lines were blurred; trees had lost their shape, the ground its solidity. Here and there objects stuck up out of the fog, like junk floating in a flood: the corner of the picnic table, the side of the garage shed, the handlebars of my bicycle. Looking up, I imagined the comet hidden behind the yellow sky, streaming its vapors down onto the Earth, spreading its mysterious outer-space gases in a white cloud over our town, our home, our lives.

Downstairs we shivered and paced through the rooms, looking at sections of the Sunday newspaper and then dropping the pages to the floor. My head hurt, my stomach ached. Our house seemed dimmer, grayer, more cramped than usual. At the Martellos’, workmen arrived early and began breaking down the tents and tables. We could hear the
clank of metal and the exchange of voices on the other side of the bayou. My mother stood at the kitchen window with a cup of coffee, hugging her bathrobe around herself and staring across the water. Her eyes darted back and forth in her pale, sharp face; her red hair stood out messily around her head. She puckered her lips and blew across her coffee, complaining about the cold.

In the afternoon it rained. It splashed on the sills outside the windows. It spread in sheets across the surface of the bayou, and beat the leaves in the yard into the mud, and streamed in rivulets under the house, sending damp cold drafts up through the floorboards. My mother turned up the gas heaters, my father turned them down. She turned them up again. He started to protest, but then he tightened his lips, sighed through his nose, and spread his student papers out on the table. He picked up his red pen and went to work, the fuzzy black cloud of frustration settling over his shoulders.

My mother changed into old clothes and began fitfully cleaning the house. She shoved the vacuum around the living room; she snatched up pieces of newspaper from the floor and threw them on the couch and bent over to pull pine needles out of the carpet below the Christmas tree. When she knocked the vacuum cleaner against a leg of the table, sloshing my father’s coffee onto some papers, he snapped his head up and shouted furiously at her.

“For crying out loud! Can’t you see I’m trying to work here?”

“And can’t you see I’m trying to clean!”

None of us wanted to be there that day, in our house, as we were. We’d seen joy and happiness and celebration, and the memory of that, the knowledge of how rich life could be, didn’t linger to warm and cheer us. Rather, it did just the opposite. None of us wanted to be us anymore. I wondered how long we’d be able to sustain ourselves, and I imagined, dramatically, the fumes of our dissatisfaction building up inside our house until they exploded, blowing out the roof and walls, leaving nothing but the burnt empty shell of a home.

Upstairs in my room, I played and replayed the evening of the party in my mind, turning it this way and that, chipping off the rough edges and polishing my recollection of it until it took on the gemlike glow of
a fable. It was like my parents’ own scientist-and-the-shopgirl story, except that mine and Gabriella’s began not in a drugstore but with a kiss in a yellow room floating above a black bayou.

I squeezed my pillow between my knees and rolled back and forth on the mattress moaning her name, hot and sick with my desire to hold her again as the winter rain pattered against the window.

The bad weather carried on into the week. The rain overflowed the ditches along the road and turned potholes into small ponds. At school the driveway was flooded up to the front door; the floors were tracked with mud, the classroom windows fogged over. Students slammed lockers and ran in the hallways; they shouted across the cafeteria and piled coats on tables and knocked chairs around. Everyone was wet and restless. We had only a week of classes left before the holiday, and everything—teachers, lessons, schoolwork—seemed like a tired and overly complicated joke, a great waste of our time.

“You dog! You goddamn dog,” Peter said when I told him about the party. He banged his fist on the table and leaned in over his lunch tray. “You got her drunk and made out with her on the floor of her bedroom? At the party? Right there? When everyone was downstairs? Man.”

Across the cafeteria, Gabriella sat with her usual group of friends at her usual table. Mark sat directly across from her. She turned her hair over her ear and picked up her fork, yanking the cords to my heart.

“It wasn’t exactly like that,” I said.

“That’s sure what it sounds like to me. It sure as hell does. You and Gabriella. You’re like my hero now. Tell me everything. Details, I need details.” He asked if when I’d gotten Gabriella on her back, I’d felt her up.

“Not quite—”

“Not quite? Not quite? What the hell does that mean? Man, I would’ve been all over that. I would’ve gotten me a handful of that.”

I tried to tell him again how it wasn’t like that, exactly.

“Then how was it, exactly? You made out with her, right? Or are you just making all this up?”

“No, it happened, it did. It’s just hard to describe. I can’t describe it. You have to experience it for yourself.”

“Well seeing as how that’s not likely to happen to me anytime soon, I just have to rely on you to enlighten me. Mr. Hugh Hefner. Mr. Playboy of the Western World.”

But I couldn’t do any better than that for Peter. How to explain it to him? How to explain the thrill I had felt when I touched her eyebrows with my finger? Or how the walls had vanished when we kissed? Or how I had shivered all over just to stand near her? How could you talk about those things with anyone? You couldn’t, not unless you lied and embellished and changed things, and so I didn’t even try.

“She said she just wants to be friends,” I admitted at last.

Peter sat back. “No. Oh, no. She didn’t say that, did she? That’s the last thing you ever want to hear from a girl.”

I told him about Mark, about how her parents were friends with his parents, and how they went to the country club and played tennis together, and how she phoned him every night. Peter listened, and then dismissed it all with a wave of his hand.

“You know what? To hell with that. Don’t worry about that. Girls always say that ‘friends’ thing. They have to. It’s like a test or something. She wants to be sure you’re serious about her before she sleeps with you.”

I didn’t ask Peter how he knew this. His father’s
Playboy
magazines? He went on.